


praying with a gun

by TolkienGirl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e03 The Final Problem, Gen, Introspection, Non-Linear Narrative, quote at the end from Galway Kinnell's 'Burning'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-14 02:09:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15378402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: All the dates are wrong, and all the data.





	praying with a gun

Overwriting does him in. It offers the one unaccounted possibility. The final truth.

He can learn from empty spaces, but not from ones he did know he filled.

 

Echoes, waking, aching.

John, at the bottom of the well.

(But how did he get there without falling?)

 

So much time spent prided on skirting the _heroic_ , only to be more mired in the _human_ than he’d ever dreamed. He is just a man, when all is said and promised. Just a man, just a beating heart and four limbs and a surprising warmth.

The weight of it is endless.

 _Ten, nine, eight_.

A little knowledge of the solar system wouldn’t go astray, but it didn’t matter on the rooftop, when the sky was bullet-gray and John was small and permanent on the pavement.

A little knowledge of a supernova is a very dangerous thing; he could see that, when his sister stepped to the glass that wasn’t glass.

 _Seven, six, five_.

He’s grown so used to guns, even ended a life in the view of king and country, won’t let, of course, that same king and country trick him into a different choice now.

(Mycroft’s heart is breaking. Oh, for all the unacknowledged truths in _that._ )

He’s grown so used to guns. The hollow eye of this one, pressed under his chin, is as sure as a comfort.

 _Three, two_.

Ah, mercy.

 

The girl in the sky and the man in the locked room and the doctor and the war and—

He’s the only one in midair. All the dates are wrong, and all the data.

( _We never had a dog._ )

 

There was sacrifice in his first few tragedies, enough to make them beautiful in shame. There is less forgiveness for the sins of a resurrected man. The world will not regret its hatred a second time.

He must remind himself of Mary, and live on.

 

Sweat, blood, dark water. He bows his head and lifts it again. This has not been a day. John, huddled in blankets, does not look afraid. John, after all, is a doctor—he knows the utility of clean breaks.

Knowledge is not so different from humility.

Not today.

 

Take the girl out of the sky, take the man out of the mirror, take the sacrifice from its suspension in the bullet-gray air. Take the bones somewhere kinder, greener, and lay them quietly to rest. This has not been a day, not really.

But they are soldiers, and they are coming home from the war.

 

_He told the yellow hound, his rescuer,_

_Its heart was bad, and it ought_

_Not wander by the creek at night;_

_If all his dogs got drowned he would be poor._


End file.
